Bathroom Monologue: A Giant Giant

If you listen to the real nutjobs they’ll tell you there is an even bigger giant than these ones. Like, impossibly bigger. She’s so big she’s got no arms or legs anymore. Maybe her belly’s so fat it overlaps them. She mostly sleeps, but when she rises apparently it knocks over all the buildings and whatnot. I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. All they say is that we’ve got this round giant living around somewhere, supposedly so huge that all the normal giants can stand on her. But I say that’s nonsense. If there was a round giant so big everyone could stand on her, wouldn’t we see her somewhere?

Bathroom Monologue: Why is the Nickel Bigger than the Dime?, or, The Feud Between Alexander Hamilton and God

God had been messing with Australia when Alexander Hamilton caught His attention. He was a smart little mortal, having just started his country and going to work on a national mint. He stamped his money with “In God We Trust,” which flattered the Big Guy, even if it was an obvious ploy to get His endorsement.

“You’re not so untrustworthy yourself,” He said, manifesting in the Mint.

“Welcome, Lord,” said Hamilton. “I’m a long-time supporter. Always happy to see another fellow in opposition of Thomas Jefferson.”

“I wish you’d stop using Me for that. I like Jefferson just fine. He’s a deist. They’re like Christians with calculators instead of Bibles.”

Well a conversation that begins like that never ends well. The two had a terrific falling-out. How exactly they got on the matter of new coinage, we really can’t say, but it’s known that God recommended currency bigger than the penny and less than the dime, since making nine cents change is such an ordeal, and back then you got paid nine cents for pretty much everything what with the smaller economy.

“I’ll give you something bigger than a penny,” Hamilton muttered in perverse prayer.

The next day he put out the nickel. Not only bigger than the penny, it dwarfed the dime. It caused massive confusion and a rush on banks for quarters because it sported the only national figure who was born and thus known at the time. George Washington found it flattering. (A century and a half later, a young FDR was baffled to find his face on coinage but took comfort that it probably meant he'd win office.)

God, being able to muck with reality at will, retaliated against Hamilton and made Thomas Jefferson’s face appear on those precious nickels. This threw off Hamilton’s anti-Jeffersonian platform, and the public suddenly thought the Secretary of Treasury had endorsed Jefferson as a candidate.

Hamilton wrote God several flippant letters over that weekend, each more biting than the last, until he got so excited that he knocked over his green ink well and ruined all his paper. This gave him a brilliant idea, and rather than throw the stack out, he invented paper money. Once again George Washington was the masthead, featured on the one dollar bill. The bill was bigger than any coin and came with nifty illustrations. Critics heralded it as a revolution in currency and literature, being as Thomas Paine wrote, "like an epic for those of small attention span." There was a rush on the banks to get the notes. George Washington was not flattered this time, figuring something was up, and left Washington D.C. in disgust with such bipartisan politics.

Hamilton showed up Monday morning to nominate himself for president. He was stunned to see the Creator had once again thrown down the gauntlet: He’d changed the very Constitution such that only natural-born citizens could hold the office. Hamilton, being a bastard from abroad, was thwarted.

The deity and founder never spoke again. God returned to Australia to mess about with the platypus and taxonomists. Hamilton was left destitute and furious. It’s said he got into a fight with Aaron Burr over a possible fifty-cent coin that would be even smaller than a dime, for which he was mortally shot. Burr never confirmed the story, though, and deemed it “contemptible, if true.”



This is the end of True History Week here on the Bathroom Monologues. Every day I've tried a little humorous Historical Fiction. If you liked today's story, please check out the others. They began Monday. All feedback is welcome!

Bathroom Monologue: Retropocalypse

The world actually ended a couple of days ago. You didn’t hear about it for the same reason you don’t hear about anything important: a massive media conspiracy. Ever since they pulled off their moon-landing scheme they’ve used subliminal messages to lull viewers into complacency, unconsciously convincing them of crazy stuff like baseball being interesting and the practical joke they call “Wyoming.” Subliminal messages were everywhere, even in cute Youtube videos about cats. They were in every 3D movie, HD broadcast, an extra on every BluRay – the commands that all was normal, to keep seeing what you had seen, to vote in American Idol, and so-on. There were several 99-cent iPhone apps the only purpose of which was to flash subliminal commands to you, and people downloaded them without thinking, you know, because they were only 99 cents. The conspiracy had to pour it on to convince you the world wasn’t ending. An angel with fiery wings riding a comet out of orbit slammed in the Pacific Ocean, creating a tidal wave and atmospheric dispersal that blocked out the sun. Those media bastards were smart, though, with sixty years of subliminal experience. They pounded our brains from so many angles for so long that even though we died two days ago, we don’t know it yet. I keep checking my e-mail even though rationally I know I’m dead and my computer is underwater. I think the media did it to keep us docile and paying right until the end, because all they care about is profit, you know? Wanted to make their bottom line even in the last days. Now we have to deal with the delusion, even if most people I tell go to a disaster movie to get it off their minds.

Bathroom Monologue: The True Story of Teddy Bear

The story about Theodore Roosevelt and the teddy bear? That’s all a lie. Sure, he had plenty of company and Roosevelt had many lackeys, but they were all there to try and calm the former President down. He was a madman!

They didn’t hunt down the bear, club it and tie it up for him. Heavens no! They were desperately trying to untie before Cousin Ted got back. He’d captured one bear, you see, for the after party, and was out slaughtering the rest of its family. That was the kind of man Theodore Roosevelt strove to be. He fought male brown bears by hand, claiming to be a sportsman, only to kick them below the belt when they got the slightest advantage. He only used a gun when two were lined up so he could fell them with a single shot, to tease and appease the ladies. You know how Walt Disney used to get in trucks and drive around to scare lemmings off cliffs for his movie? He got the idea from Cousin Ted, who drove entire families of bears off cliffs for laughs and a cheap lay.

Why would a man do this? Was he a monster? Out for revenge? Perhaps drowning his sorrows in the cheap joys of man-on-animal violence? Wise historian, you’ve already guessed what heartbreak drove this former president to mass bear slaughter, haven’t you?

It was love. Love of the sweetest bear that ever roamed the American wilderness. The bear that stole the breath away from him, which was not such an effort given his asthma, but still a rare feat for a thousand-pound lady of another species. She drew his attention one summer when he held the presidency and their affair quickly became legendary. Oh, the bedding that had to be secretly burned, and you’ll never look at that portrait of George Washington the same way again if I tell you how the scrap at the bottom was torn.

But her family refused their love. They ostracized her, and though Cousin Ted offered to get her a job as a Congressional gofer, she knew she simply wouldn’t fit in. America was not ready for a brown bear as its first lady. She knew he’d run again. She was a wise bear.

She was found in a national park, poisoned. Experts suspected foul play, but Roosevelt diagnosed her with a broken heart. He cut a bloody rampage through the bear population for years afterwards, until Taft got a little too hairy for his liking and required challenging for the presidency. Her prophecy came true.

Roosevelt was so swept up in his bear hating that he never thought one of them was his son. It was the great secret she took to the grave, but somewhere out in the wilderness today there lurks a bespectacled Teddy Bear Roosevelt. His mustache leaves him unmistakable. One simple blood test is all it will take and his political lineage will be proven. Then he’ll run for the seat his father never lost, to empower one of America’s least preserved minorities. Yes, my countrymen: a bear will run for president, and he’ll win, because there’s nothing cuter than a teddy bear.

Bathroom Monologue: First Man on the Moon

There are many stories about why Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon, but the truth is elegant.

Michael Collins agreed that if he lost he’d stay in lunar orbit, so he got to call it in the air. He called tails.

Buzz Aldrin thought he was slick and called heads.

They knew something was up when they turned to Neil and found he wasn’t sweating it.

The coin flipped through the air. And flipped. And kept flipping, floating away from them down the shuttle. It Collins and Aldrin an interstellar minute to realize there wasn't enough gravity in space for the coin to land.

Having called nothing, Neil Armstrong got to take the giant leap for mankind, plant the flag and become the icon of space travel.

All three were proud to bring humanity to its moon. Buzz and Collins, though, would never touch anything smaller than a one-dollar bill for the rest of their lives.

Bathroom Monologue: Square Before Circle

The wheel is an overrated invention, especially if you speak to the people who were around when it was invented. Of course you probably haven’t since they’ve been dead for millennia and their language is gone, but if you could, they’d tell you the hype around the invention of the wheel was also the invention of overratedness.

The true great invention was the square. Look around nature and you find umpteen circles: circular tree trunks, circular wrists, circular eyes. This one cavemen was trying to be creative when he smashed up a big rock into a cube. The cube, mathematicians will tell you, is an overachieving square.

His wife always wanted to go places but didn’t want to walk. She wanted luxury to be invented, you see. His idea was that she could sit on top of the square while he pushed from the back. The flat bottom would keep it moving along smoothly.

This wife was kind of annoying. She picked on him, suggesting better postures and angles from which he could push her stone square. So the caveman eventually invented the accident, repeatedly accidentally knocking the stone square over and tossing his wife to the ground.

All this knocking over had an effect on the square. Its edges going abraded so often that they wore down. After some time and wifely nitpicking, the square was rounded down into a wheel. She couldn’t even sit on it anymore and berated his crappy geometric invention.

The wheel wound up sitting in the side of their cave with the winter pelts for some seasons until his boy grew old enough to push it. He delighted in pushing it down hills, watching is whiz along. Sometimes it hit an animal and lunch was invented. Road kill came up sooner than the car. It was only eating the non-squished bits of a sabretooth tiger that the caveman thought there could be other applications for his great “invention.”

His wife knew better. She’d have spread the word, too, if he hadn’t built her another square to push her around on whenever she felt like a Sunday out.

True History Week

This week is True History week. It's dedicated to what really happened in some of the key events in history, including:

-That the invention of the wheel was an accident.

-Why Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon when he didn't even partake in the coin toss.

-That former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt not only loved bears, but impregnated one.

-That the world has already ended and why we don't know it.

-And that the size of a popular U.S. coin was the result of a feud between one of our Founding Fathers and God.

Bathroom Monologue: Uncivilized Dining

"Utter barbarians. They eat the flesh of wild beasts. Sometimes they domesticate them on farms, but always are the beasts slaughtered. They hack them up, taking the tissue from the ribs here, or the gullet, or tongue, or something called "sweet meats." You don't want to know what those are. They like the taste of beasts, and more barbarically, they throw it on fires first! It seems burning these pieces of the dead makes them taste even better. Rip off hunks of animal, char it beyond recognition and then consuming the product. Why they can't just eat their young like a civilized race, I don't know. You should hear them complain about overpopulation as though there isn’t a nutritious option right at the supper table! I say we skip this one and give space travel to the next planet."

Bathroom Monologue: The author, the character, and Gurta the Demon

Gurta drew one of his fingernails along the sand dune. It wasn’t a proper fingernail, but an iron nail jutting from the tip of the demon’s finger. The Character couldn’t tell if it was infected or not, but all the flesh around the nail had turned a shade of purple that didn’t look native to the otherwise tomato-red demon.

It spoke in a voice that, if the Character was pressed, he would describe as similarly infected by purple.

“The Author enjoys cuteness and doesn’t see it detracting from His attempts at seriousness.”

The desert erupted in hundreds of geysers. The water fell and splashed into unnatural shapes, forming the outlines of trees, rocks, a road, and a general landscape. All conveniently froze in place. The water and beige pastoral remained for a few seconds before colored washed over it, and suddenly the Character and Gurta stood on a lonely stretch of highway, next to a bleach-blonde in a yellow sundress, standing beside an apparently malfunctioning cherry red convertible.

“After all, cuteness is often merely seriousness with broader perspective,” elucidated Gurta. “A child is very serious at opening a lock. It’s only with the adult’s withdrawn perspective, knowing that the child is using an oversized plastic novelty key on a 200-year-old Slavic liquor cabinet, that the serious situation is recognized as cute. It is similar to how chaos is merely order observed too closely, or something utterly negligible given attention. Observe.”

The bleach-blonde pursed her lips at her cell phone. She cursed, then complained. It all came out like the wa-wa’s of Charlie Brown’s school teacher, yet the Character got the gist. She didn’t understand how her cell could possibly not work.

The earth pulled back and spectrums shifted. Suddenly Redge wasn’t seeing in colors anymore, instead seeing signals pinging out of her cell, bouncing off of forests and mountains, and those that made it through dissipating into nothingness with several more miles to go before reaching the nearest cell tower.

Probably for effect, the earth pulled forward until the Character could read her cell phone bill, somewhere in her glove compartment. The figure was only three digits, which convinced the Characters that this zoom was for humorous effect.

Then everything fell apart into sand again, starting out all colored, but beige by the time it splashed into dunes. Even the bleach-blonde melted to dust.

“I don’t think I get it,” lied the Character.

“Or do you not want to get it?” clarified Gurta. “I can’t really blame you.”

The earth pulled forward again, flying in on just one grain of sand. Infinitely deep within it sat twelve grave men in grey suits, muttering about how to end the war.

The world pulled back and thousands of men in various tattered uniforms charged at each other, exploding in sprays of heroism and gore.

Things pulled so far back that the Character wondered if he still had eyes. There was the universe, so many splotches of color like crayon marks on a child’s placemat. Otherwise, black. The Character had no notion of where his home was in all of it. The Character pointed at the center.

“Is that where earth is?”

“No,” said Gurta. “It’s actually three trillion kilometers to the left of the earth, in the middle of the void of space. But the Author will move earth there now. A good change of pace. Break away from a norm, you know?”

The Character frowned and wondered what would happen to the tides.

“Cute.”

Bathroom Monologue: Do Not Hug the Golem

A golem is the best friend you could have. Forget slutty eternal elves. Forget conniving humans. Just because they're your species, or have blood in their veins, or brains and personalities to match that blood, does not make them good friends or reliable business partners. In fact, all those features make them distinctly bad business partners.

One reason you want the golem as a best friend is that he'll never hog the seats during travel. If there's only room for one on the carriage, he'll let you sit. If you only have one horse, he'll let you ride it. He will walk.

Another reason you want the golem as your best friend is that when you're stranded in the middle of the wilderness, he won't kill the carriage’s horse for food. He doesn't eat except when he's nervous, and then he only snacks on dirt. You can't ride dirt to safety.

Also, once the horse has been cooked and gone bad, your golem best friend won't turn on you. He won't try to cannibalize your left arm under the rationalization that you're a righty.

The golem best friend also won't run off in the middle of the night, abandoning you once it's obvious that he can't eat you in your sleep.

The golem is a better friend because he will actually carry you back to civilization. You’ll be sick from hunger, utterly useless to him, and he’ll cradle you in his craggy arms until homes are in sight. Even when the villagers run at him with pitchforks and torches, he'll stay with you until you get a hot meal.

Now after that, he will run away. To be fair, all best friends will run away once you're safe and people are stabbing them with farm equipment.

However very few best friends will then loiter on the city limits, hiding behind the biggest tree available, until you're healthy and ready to disembark.

The only downside to the golem best friend is that he'll break your ribs when he hugs you upon seeing you again.

Do not hug the golem.

"He" Attacks The Bijou

Today's story is "Possible Origins For Him. 1." It remains the most popular recorded version of a monologue I've ever done. Something about a laugh at the end.

You know, there never was a "2." That will have to change.

Anyway, the monologue is appearing at Kate's Bijou. The Bijou is a spot for various pieces of short fiction and reflection, largely by the thirty-three (or so) authors from the upcoming Harbinger*33 anthology. The anthology will hopefully be out later this year. I've got two pieces hidden away inside it.

Don't worry. One of them is funny.

"Possible Origins For Him. 1." and its corresponding audio performance went up this morning. There's also a little message on upcoming places my fiction is going to appear, if you like spoilers.

Bathroom Monologue: Be Both, My Son

Today's Bathroom Monologue comes with a performance. You can download or listen to John Wiswell's "Be Both, My Son" here. Just click on the arrow to stream the monologue.

Am I deep or shallow? A silly question. I have my profound regrets and trivial pleasures, my deep loves and petty grievances. What is a man without all of these ingredients? Deep or shallow? Do you mistake the sea for a thing only deep? What sea lacks shallows can never come ashore, and what use would be in a sea that never bordered land? No ships could dock it, no men jump into it – no way to wade, dive or plunge into the dark depths, if not by a shallow purchase from which to begin. No different than the ocean of love I once had for your mother, which toppled out of simple lust for her bosom. Fair dame, she wore a corset and deceived even that. Is one better, the trivial or the profound? Is one a superior state? Is one a minor manifestation? Is one a mistaken magnification? I suppose you could have a preference, over whether you dampen or drown those who fall into you. Yet never will I make the choice, to be only a wading pool, or only an implausible sea. Be both, my son. Both the trivial and the profound have their charms, their merits and beauty, their vast utilities, in their own times.





If you like this, please give it a tweet/Stumble/Digg. John's away this week and can't promote it himself. A bunch of comments would probably make his day when he gets back.

Bathroom Monologue: What Happened at the Race

Most runners couldn’t even see the starting line. Thousands of people filed up the streets in jogging shorts, pulling on numbered tees and wishing they’d done more cardio. They stretched, and either guzzled sports drinks or sniped about how drinking fluids before a race made you puke.

The announcement came and the stragglers cleared to the sidewalks. The runners all bent in preparation, several hundred rows of humans looking ahead to spandex-clad butts, save the front row, which looked down the empty road.

“And…” said the mayor, pausing for a moment of drama. Nobody was listening to him. When he saw no eyes come to him, he frowned and fired the starting pistol.

There was a loud cheer joining the echo of the shot. The runners leapt up. It was like sudden thunder in the subways.

Rumble.

Rumble.

Then a startled cry.

It was the cry of twenty people, the former first row, as they toppled into the pavement. All twenty went down, limbs akimbo.

The second and third rows let out slightly more amateur cries as they spilled onto the first row, then went face down on the pavement.

The mayor was forced to watch as nearly everyone in eleven rows of marathon runners slammed into the heap. It was like watching a third car slam into an accident, that unnecessary crash, except this was the equivalent of eight more cars behind it, and twenty lanes across. People screamed, many coming at the mayor either exaggerating ankle injures or demanding they start over and perhaps put me in front this time.

The mayor waved them off, looking at the street. He followed the sidewalk down into the gutter across from where the first runner had fallen. Something glistened amidst the grey.

He picked it up and quickly it went taut in his hand. It was a wire. He cussed and looked down the gutter, but the assailants were already gone. He yanked at it and saw it run into the mass of humanity still struggling and complaining in the road.

Yes, someone had used this wire to trip up the racers. And the mayor knew who. The bloody racists had struck again.

Instructions [WARNING: EXPLICIT MATERIAL]

Instructions
[WARNING: EXPLICIT MATERIAL]

1. Plug toaster into an electrical outlet.
2. Place one slice of bread in each slot.
3. Adjust dial to preferred toasting setting.
4. Push lever down.
5. Once the lever pops back up, remove toast.

Witches on Thaumatrope

Today's story is via Thaumatrope. They're a neat a Twitter service that pays pro per-word rates, but only for stories one tweet long.

Mine's about witches, haunting and law enforcement. It's Thaumatrope's story of the day. You can read it here.

Bathroom Monologue: Bubble Branes

God reclined in His cosmic tub. The bubble bath was so high that one couldn’t tell where the bubbles ended and His beard began (secretly, they didn’t end and begin – but to know more about that would spoil the surprise). The room was two-dimensional and beige as He was feeling, respectively, frugal and beige today.

One hand stirred the water from beneath the layer of suds, while the other held up His new Kindle. It wasn’t a real Kindle, but it was a good knock-off suited to extradimensional leisure reading. It had to be pretty big and sturdy to function outside the M-branes. How big? So big that something as small as a planet might look up and mistake it for a universe.

His thumb scrolled down the list of book reviews, switching back and forth between Romances and Science. Being omniscient, nothing really caught His eye, but He liked to pretend they did.

“Ooo,” He cooed, vibrating all the strings of the omniverse for a voice. He leaned up a little, reading one product description.

“ Kaku skillfully guides us through the latest innovations in string theory and its latest iteration, M-theory, which posits that our universe may be just one in an endless multiverse, a singular bubble floating in a sea of infinite bubble universes. If M-theory is proven correct, we may perhaps finally find an answer to the question, "What happened before the big bang?" ”

He knew how this one ended already, but it was amusing. He propped one ankle on the opposing knee and greased two of his fingers on a beige bar of soap. His toes splayed. He rubbed the fingers briskly between the toes until rainbow bubbles poured down from between them and hummed to a few bubbles in particular.

“You’re getting warm, little guys. Keep it up. I’m rooting for you!”

Bathroom Monologue: How Neat a Future

Because they're all old, you don't think about it. But a president is going to be born this year, or soon. He might have been born this morning. She might have been born this morning! We've already got a black president. Imagine: by the time all the little girls down at the local hospital grow up to be 35 so they can run for president, what barriers will be down? I mean, in thirty-five years? I'll be old. I'll hate the music. I'll think the Shia woman being sworn in is immodest to be naked. It's cold out – put some kind of scarf on! That generation was so weird, but they did their own thing and there's their naked Shia woman president, who probably has three daughters she thinks are wild beyond control. As I take my heart medication I'll wonder what taboos are left. Is modesty the new taboo? Will it be cutting edge to vote in a boring white guy president who is so pretentious that he wears pants to the Senate? Maybe they'll clone JFK and raise him on old-fashioned HD TV and Youtube videos with traditional American values. I don't know. The babies born in the hospital today don't know. But they'll grow up to be it. How crazy. How neat a future.

Evolution of Silverware, OR, “Do you believe forks evolved from spoons?” –Blogspot question

“Well, do you?” asked the knife.

“You know how to kill a mood,” said the spoon. “We’re finally both clean and alone, I just laid down a fresh napkin, and you have to bring up relatives.”

“So you think they are descended from you?”

“We do not have a common ancestor. Do I look anything like a fork to you?”

“No, sweety. You’re elegant.”

“Damn right I am. Ever seen a fork with trim like mine?”

“The forks in our set are very stylistically—”

“Finish that sentence and see if you don’t sleep on the floor tonight.” The spoon huffed. “Or maybe you want to go sleep with the fork. After all, we’re the same to you!”

“That’s not what I was asking!”

“Is the Menu not good enough for you?”

The knife shook. “The Menu is infallible.”

“Darned shiny it is! And it says nothing about us having common lineage. Silverware has always been laid out this way. There’s nothing more to it.”

"See, that’s a problem. I hear that other tables the fork and knife are man and wife, and the spoon stands alone.”

“You have been fantasizing about forks! It’s the slits up the front, isn’t it? Gets you nice and polished? Is this what the other knives talk about when they're alone in the drawer?”

“I’m just wondering if silverware evolved differently over there."

“They’re savages. Probably get you nice and polished, imagining foreign tables with no napkins. Maybe all silverware evolved from the pins they stick in olives! Dirty pins with no modesty. That doing it for you, Knife?”

“Honeyspoon!”

“Don’t Honeyspoon me! I let it go now and by mid-supper you’ll be moaning about sporks.”

“They’re unexplainable!”

“They’re all plastic! There is no metal spork. It's the missing link in your magical theory that lets you rub up against any old utensil you want.”

The knife sighed.

“I’ll get on the floor…”

“Tell me if you discover any of the plate’s descendents down there, Mr. Paleontologist!”

“Ow!” Robert cried, dropping his knife. It clattered off his lap and to the carpet. He waved his hand, then sucked on his bleeding thumb.

Cheryl tilted her head at him. “Are you okay, honey?”

“Yeah,” Robert said, frowning at his spoon. “No idea what just happened.”

Bathroom Monologue: Salek the Shapeshifter

Salek comes from a race of very mild shapeshifters. He can morph his brow a little, a bit of skintone or ear positioning. It’s not terribly useful on a world with a single dominant species. Think about your neighbors. Messing with his forehead and ears wouldn’t convince you that your nextdoor neighbor was actually his wife. But when humans live with other intelligent species, it’s great at fooling them. That’s because all Danarians look alike. Flaky blue skin, no ears, big chins. Unless they have a hideous scar or a breathing mask on, they all look alike to you. So Salek can change to like any other Danarian, and fool none of his own kind. But to me? With the gill-beard thing, he looked like the owner of the company. I’m just saying that… you know. I didn’t realize it was Salek. I should have figured the president wouldn’t ask me to load up a truck with all the isotopes, but I didn’t want to get fired. I still don’t want to get fired. That’s why I’m explaining that it was probably Salek. I don’t know because… well, they all look alike.

Bathroom Monologue: A Get-Well Voodoo Doll for Gerard

His last visitor was Lionel. Gerard's Mom held him to last so she could claim it was getting late and kick him out whenever it sounded appropriate.

Gerard's Mom stayed in the hall, talking with doctors. Lionel slid right around her, plopping in the visitor's seat beside the bed. His arms folded next to Gerard's leg, which was in a cast so huge it belonged in a cartoon.

"It doesn't look that bad," said Lionel.

"It's exactly as bad as it looks. It'll be at least a year. So much for the Stanford internship." Gerard folded his arms over his chest. "This blows."

Lionel leaned in all conspiratorial-like.

"Listen, I know you're not that into voodoo now that you're a scientist...”

“I was raised in voodoo. It's you who doesn't understand how it works.”

“I made a doll with a strand of your hair.” Lionel motioned with his hands as though playing with an action figure. “Hair’s got your genes on it, so it’s also scientific.”

“And what did you do? Fix its leg?”

“No, better! You know that nuclear test site?”

Gerard went a little pale.

“What did you do to my voodoo doll?”

“I left it at the center of the explosion.”

“You're trying to kill me?”

“No! See, the next day I drove out there in a hazmat suit and left another voodoo doll of you. Except this one was huge and green.”

“What?”

“The Hulk has a healing factor. He survives bullets and bombs. A broken leg is fixed overnight! Plus, who doesn't want super strength?”

“Lionel, you idiot! That’s not how voodoo or science works!”

“Good!” Lionel rose to his feet, punching his open hand. “Get angry! That’s how it works!”

Bathroom Monologue: All Alone

I'm in a class of my own, but that's not a good thing. There used to be fourteen thieves in my class. About as good, some even went to the same school. I'm on my own now because most of them got their dumb asses killed. Two retired, married each other. They wound up getting killed a couple years later when one of their marks finally caught up with them. The other twelve happen to have tried to pinch the same Philosopher’s Egg you’re offering me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at. If I can guess, it’s once-in-a-lifetime for me. For you, maybe thirteen times in a lifetime? Very easy for you to make the offer of 80/20 when it’s only your partners who wind up sliced up by invisible wires or chowed upon by the gryphon hatchlings that nest up there. 80/20? It’s rich, but the only thing I’d to spend it on is my funeral. And I don't even want a coffin. A cremation and a quiet service with a couple dozen up-and-comers, to see who can steal me first. Up on the altar, not some elaborate place. I want them to compete against each other, not these psychotic traps that necessitate so many great thief funerals.

Ten Revelations About John Wiswell

Laura Eno of http://lauraeno.blogspot.com/ recently granted me the “Sugar Doll” award. I am not one for chain letters and awards posts most of the time, but the condition of this award is to reveal ten things about yourself. To tell a little story in ten revelations was something I kept coming back to in the bathroom.

-In 4th grade, after looking up "wolverine," "gambit," and "nightcrawler" in the dictionary, I was disappointed to find there was no definition for "silver surfer." This began a little streak in my life.

-I fervently avoided looking up "arbitrary" from when I first heard it in middle school (on an episode of Seinfeld). I went ten years before having to learn what it meant because it kept losing me arguments in Philosophy class.

-I first thought "metaphysics" had to do with cubes and three-dimensional shapes. That mistake went uncorrected for about five years.

-I began to ignore Scientology in the middle of the first sentence I heard someone mention it in. I left thinking they worshipped microscopes and genes. That mistake went uncorrected for about seven years.

-From Middle School until I came to my college dining hall, I thought "vegans" were something my brother made up.

-I managed to go the entire Religion unit of a college History & Politics course without learning what "secular" and "non-secular" meant, despite using them frequently and to the apparent nodding approval of my professor and peers.

-I didn't read all of Hamlet until after I graduated from college, despite having a concentration in Literature and a faculty that mandated reading Shakespeare.

-I still don't know what "Hari Krishna" means. Sometimes at meals I'll wet my fingers, make the sign of the cross and say it. I've managed to go twenty years without learning its actual meaning and find more direct pleasure in my ignorance about it than in almost any single piece of knowledge I have.

-I still hear the lyric, “Beelzebub has the devil put aside for” in Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as "Beelzebub has the devil for a cyborg."

-I believe everyone has things like the above nine items. Some people recognize them, others try not to, and still more others deny. I have an immediate distrust for anyone who appears like they would hide such quirks.

Quilted For Your Pleasure: All He Tastes is Burning

A Bathroom Monologue experiment today: I came up with a three-panel cartoon in the bathroom, sent the script to an artist, and let him do whatever he wanted with it. It's still technically a Bathroom Monologue, but illustrated. It's an experiment I like to call "Quilted for Your Pleasure"

The artist is Max Cantor. Max is a good old friend from college who read several of the first Bathroom Monologues by IM. It's encouragement from people like him that made this site happen. The BMs originally ran on one of his websites, for what I assume was an audience of my girlfriend and his mother. His mother commented more often, which is one reason why I'm single.

If the strip gets enough positive response we might make this a regular feature on Sundays. All feedback is welcome.

Anyway, here's our golem:

Bathroom Monologue: What is the trial of the century?

The trial of the century was not about that. It was not about all the blood in the sports star's other car. It wasn't about the color of his skin or how many tenths of a man that made him. It was not about whether he could vote for president, or whether he could vote in the PTA meeting about strangers teaching your children strange things. It was not about separation of the lab and the pulpit. It was not about foreign ethnics rounded up, caged and nearly exterminated. It was not judged by a single authority, or a tribunal, or a jury of its peers, or a million men marching at the city on the hill. The trial of the century was judged by a jury of millennia. Like always, they found the century guilty.

Bathroom Monologue: Transgender

Thanks for all the positive feedback! This story is down for the time being as it's being submitted for potential publication.

Bathroom Monologue: Fifty Blank Pages

I’ve got a new gimmick for novels that no one will even know is a gimmick until they finished the book. I’m putting fifty blank pages at the end of my next novel. It's terrible for trees, but I'll print on recycled paper if that will fix things up ecologically. It's just got to be done. I've got to fool readers into believing the book is longer than it is.

As much as they might want to, most readers don’t ride a book. They're smart and critical and look for all the clues. They can decipher the theme behind Gatsby’s riches before the first party is over. They register that a third of the way into Stephen King's Dead Zone, Mr. Smith has only begun to get the powers the plot revolves around, and judge King’s efficiency. They catch not only foreshadowing but all character and plot details to build a mental schematic of what is possible in the book, and thereby predicting what's to come. In building such schematics nothing is as useful as book geography - that is, what page you're on out of how many pages are in the book. They simply can't have figured out the killer in a twist-a-thon mystery with a hundred pages left. The terrorists must have an escape plan if they're busted with so many pages left to go.

Everyone does this, which is to say: I do it, and do it often enough that I can convince myself that everyone else must. Hey! Don't shy away from that. That's Dostoyevsky-level introspection and honesty right there. I am a repentant asshole when I read; I constantly apologize and keep on sinning. There are a few wonderful readers who sink deep into the book and turn the last page in the hopes that there’s a brief final chapter on the inner book jacket. These wonderful people will forgive so long as the book is good (that part I’m working on), while the schemers require a scheme. Their reader's foresight is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night, knowing no matter how hard I plot, whether my audience can or can't predict exactly what will happen, that they will expect something to happen based on the typographical real estate remaining.

Very few writers can beat the schematic-building readers. That’s why I’m doing this. Fifty blank bonus pages at the end of my next novel so you’ll be sure there’s another reveal. Is she really his mother? Were the jewels real? Surely I’ll reveal it in the end. Except those twists are stupid and I’d never dream of including them. Instead I’ll give you the space to invent your own filler, which you might have hated had it been there.

You'll think there are sixty-five pages left when there are only fifteen. By this means you’ll remain comfortable, not bracing yourself for detachment. It’ll tie up before you’re ready, when you’re still at the height of feeling and full of schemes about where this is going. Fifty blank pages will be the painting of the tunnel on the mountainside, or the sharp turn that sends the coyote off the cliff, or whatever your favorite Roadrunner analogy is. The main character dies in the shoot-out, is pronounced dead and does not make the miraculous recovery you thought he would because those next several dozen pages aren't part of the plot at all. They're simply recycled red herrings.

Bathroom Monologue: Correlation and Causation

I have this mental image of a guy in black and white stripes carrying a bag with a dollar sign on it. He's cornered by men in cowboy hats.

He goes, "Now, now. Correlation does not imply causation."

One cowboy goes, "Only two kinds of people say that: the guilty and the GET HIM!"

Not sure what happens next.

Bathroom Monologue: Imaginary answer to an imaginary question asked by Charlie Rose in an interview that never happened

"There’s so much to read now. We take for granted what really only came to be recently. There is no barrier between the old and new Literature. With Project Gutenberg, Google Books and similar services, thousands of classics are clicks away. There’s no charge. You don’t even have to go to the library. It’s not this way for the whole world, but for our part of it there are no book burnings and a library banning something doesn’t make it unavailable. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is free on who-knows-how-many websites. The barriers are down, not just in accessibility, but in what used to be able to go together. You can buy the last Harry Potter book and the first Charles Dickens book in the same order from Amazon.com, and buying them together might qualify for free shipping. Nearly all the classics in our language can be found, and more people are writing right now than ever before. Tweets, blogs, bad poetry and long novels – it’s pouring literacy out there, at the same time as it’s never been so easy to get a copy of The Odyssey or Anna Karenina. That’s exciting. That’s why my reading habits are so weird. I don’t understand a Science Fiction author who only reads Sci Fi. I’m doing Good Omens right now, Brave New World next, then Walter Isaacson’s Einstein biography. I read a classic, then history or science, then contemporary popular fiction, then another classic, then a magazine, then a short story anthology, then comic books from Japan. Comic books from Japan! A hundred years ago, were there comic books in Japan? A hundred years ago there was no way you could have even found out sitting in a living room in America. Today you can type it into a search engine and find out. Back then typing was rare, search engines didn’t exist, and the answer was unimaginable."

Bathroom Monologue: Magical Science

Magic and science have never been at odds. That would be like science being at odds with gravity or electricity. Science is about how things work. There were times when the scientific community didn’t understand electricity, but with study they got it to go through wires and power our televisions. Magic is merely a force, be it Eldritch, demonic or divine, that we didn’t understand, no different than lightning was to the Neanderthals.

The feud wasn’t between magic and science; it was between magicians and scientists. Magicians were always a private lot, rarely sharing their knowledge with each other. That’s why you had pyromancers, geomancers and necromancers instead of generalmancers. In their own way, wizards were scientists in that they tested and analyzed their own knowledge. They were most unscientific in that they wouldn’t share, especially not with real scientists.

Real scientistis intimidated the magi with their steam engines and cannons. Today conservative magicians will claim the elders were protecting their arts from exploitation, from a scientific community that turned knowledge of combustion into guns and bombs and knowledge of disease into biological warfare. Yet we have enough records of armies of skeletons to know magicians have never been entirely pacifistic.

They hid their knowledge because a man who knows how to build a gun and summon a fireball will put everyone else out of business. Conjurable pet griffins and magic carpets had a hard enough time competing against the locomotive. But if engineers knew how to manipulate magical forces, like summoning that fire? The locomotives would become so efficient that competition would be impossible. You could light up entire city electrical grids with one thunder spell. You could, and we did, hire demons to protect your internet firewalls so any hacker who tried passing it suddenly went blind. With empirical reason, we knew magic better than the ancients in mere years. We just had to get magic into the lab.

Shame what happened to the magicians. The smart ones moved into scholastics. Some actually teach science history, since they were around when magic broke into science (or vice versa). Others returned to their tribes, to continue playing witch doctors. They didn’t want to move on with civilization, where they’d be amateurs at their specialty.

Bathroom Monologue: “Today’s Writing Prompt: Death” or, He Died on the Keyboard

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